I also showed my phone photos. This is a web page consisting, at the moment, of about 1300 photographs taken on my phone. It’s something I’ve been doing for a couple of years but I’ve only just gotten round to getting it all online. Here’s the link:

There’s no specific theme to the pictures, but there are things that develop, as you look at all of them together, mainly because of the kind of things I usually take pictures of. I’m interested in urbanisation; the way people have changed the world and how we’ve chosen to adapt it for own ends. So there are a lot of shots of odd details in bits of cities. Hand dryers, scrawled signs or warnings, details from the textile pattern of a chair on a bus. All of these things end up getting photographed. The main reason why this is relevant to my project is that I wanted to know how effective the mode of presentation was and whether I wanted to explore it any further. There’s something overwhelming about it, after all. There’s so much there to look at. I like the fact that there’s so much to take in at one sitting.

I guess the page is also looking at the way having cameras on phones is changing the way people think about cameras generally. A photograph simultaneously has more and less value now. We cam take literally hundreds of pictures in a day and many of them will be very throwaway. And yet there seems to be more of an obsession with pictures now, if in a poorer quality format. Funny that.

Cornwall

I took some photographs in Cornwall over Easter. Here is one such picture:

Regular readers, (Hi Andy) may notice my fondness for bleak hillsides. It was very nice to get out to take some pictures. At times I could have almost swooned with pleasure. I know this sounds daft. This is a really important part of making anything for me.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

She came and gave us a talk today. She made me realise how much I’ve missed by not attending lectures here. I’ll have to force time into my schedule. She spoke of layering techniques, putting one heavily manipulated image on top of another less manipulated image, then erasing lots of the manipulated one so that parts of the other becomes visible. She was kind enough to give me some slides from her powerpoint presentation that demonstrate this. This layering thing is clearly very relevant to my own thoughts about layering my moments (I’ve so got to find a better word for that).